


let the years we're here be kind

by emorosadiaz



Series: home is when i'm alone with you [2]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Jake in prison, Mental Health Issues, Peraltiago, Romance, Rosa in prison, Sad, Team as Family, between s4 and s5, literally this is. so sad. but happy ending, this is pure Amy-centric angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-06 05:37:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14050056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emorosadiaz/pseuds/emorosadiaz
Summary: By week two since Jake and Rosa were sent to prison, Amy nearly has the entire file on Hawkins memorized word for word. Even when she’s working on another case, she leaves the Hawkins file open on her desk, just off to the side, still in her peripheral vision, so she can glance over it in between the normal cases. At home, it stays spread out over the coffee table as it had been the day of Jake and Rosa’s sentencing, as if Amy can’t let it out of her sight.(She sees the words when she closes her eyes every night, usually after two or three in the morning, because she can only sleep when her body’s exhaustion forces her to.)(She lets this slip to Terry on accident one day, and he looks at her with that expression of concern he always had ready to offer Jake when he’d do something reckless.)





	let the years we're here be kind

**Author's Note:**

> i've been a sad and emo lump for the last week and a half so i projected myself onto amy bc grieving isn't always for the dead and this happened asdfghjkl;
> 
> content warning for lots of mentions of mental illness and its effects and stuff. title comes from "north" by sleeping at last

The first time Amy walks through the front door of their apartment alone after Jake’s sent to prison, the rest of the squad is there.

After Jake had been whisked away from them in the courtroom, with a wild panic in his eyes, Amy’s ears burned in that illogical way that meant someone was thinking or talking about you—except when she turned back to look at the others after a solid thirty seconds of staring at the closed door Jake and Rosa had just been taken through, she found herself to be the center of attention.

(Her eyes tried to put out the flames in her ears and cheeks, producing fat, heavy tears that started coming and wouldn’t _stop_ coming, and still haven’t stopped coming.)

So, she’s far from alone when she crosses the threshold, stopping at the shoe rack. Captain Holt hovers protectively behind her, and the skin on the back of her neck burns from the intense stare she _knows_ he’s watching her with. She takes a few slow steps further into the apartment.

“Your shoes, girl,” Gina cuts through the silence, carefully and more gently than Amy’s ever heard from her before.

Amy stops again, but this time, she forces herself to turn around and meet the four stares locked on her. Terry and Charles had just shown up when they’d gotten to the apartment complex, with a fear in their eyes akin to Jake’s.

(It’s then that she thinks maybe the panic in his eyes hadn’t just been for himself, but for her, and how she, how _they_ , could survive another separation, in this cruel, cruel universe that never fails to build a seemingly impenetrable wall between them at the most crucial times.)

“Thank you for coming,” she says quietly, her voice shaky and broken, but she forces herself to proceed. “But you don’t need to stay. I’m fine.”

Terry, Gina, and Charles all look to Captain Holt for some sort of response. When he doesn’t give an immediate one, Terry steps up. “We just—wanted to be with you.”

“I appreciate it,” she says, feeling a fresh set of tears well up, because her brain struggles to comprehend love sometimes, but the squad is always there for her, beyond the daily teasing and bickering. “But I think I—I want to be alone.”

“Santiago,” Captain Holt starts, but whatever words he’d had planned die on his lips. He pauses. “Amy. I’m…sorry we couldn’t stop this. But we’ll get them out.”

“I know,” she whispers. A smile ghosts her lips briefly. “I know.”

They leave her after that, murmuring well wishes and reassurances on their way out her door. She closes it softly behind them, slowly turning the lock into place. She allows her forehead to dip forward until its resting against the cold surface, just under the peep hole, as she releases a deep, full-body sigh that makes the shakiness in her legs painfully evident.

(She doesn’t remember much of her night after that. She recalls flashes of hot tears and a strange conglomeration of fear and determination shaking her frame continuously. The copies of the paperwork from the case file she’d pored over just earlier that morning—somehow, within the same day as their separation, somehow, he’d been there just _earlier_ —remain littered across the table after she falls asleep, the notion of _fifteen years_ hanging over her head like a promise she hadn’t wanted to make, but was forced to.)

* * *

All eyes are on her again the next morning, at the precinct, when she rolls in just minutes before the hour, which one side of her brain screams is _late_ while the other side screams back _who cares_ , because it’s hard to distinguish what matters from what doesn’t right now. 

All eyes follow her from the moment the elevator doors open to reveal her to the moment she forces herself to keep walking past Jake’s desk to get to her own, just beside it. She keeps her eyes trained determinedly to the ground, only shifting to focus on her own desk—but nothing further, because his desk is just _right there_ above hers in her vision—when she sets her purse and coffee down.

All eyes remain on her until, finally, she looks up to meet them, and the only person who doesn’t look away is Gina, tapping her fingers against her desk in a strangely rhythmic fashion, just beside her phone, with the screen dark for once.

“Hey, girl,” she says with as much of a smile Amy figures she can muster. “Love the pantsuit.”

This is their routine, Amy thinks. Though it’s softer today, Gina’s still maintaining some semblance of normalcy, because anxious minds crave nothing more than a solid, structured routine to depend on when everything else goes off the rails.

And Gina knows this.

So, Amy returns the tiny, broken smile, before settling into her desk without a word. After setting her purse down by her feet, she accidentally catches sight of Jake’s desk on her way back up, which prompts her gaze to travel to Rosa’s desk, then back to Jake’s, and then quickly back to her own, because they’re a case that she needs to solve right now—just like any other victims, just like any other case.

She opens their file against Hawkins that was left on her desk.

* * *

She’d started out so strong, so determined, but it only takes a week before she starts to notice the familiar cracks. 

The last time this happened, when Jake and Captain Holt were just _gone_ indefinitely and she felt the preexisting cracks in the foundation of her mind start to spider-web longer and deeper to the point of undoing the progress from a lifetime of therapy, she turned to Rosa.

Rosa, silent and deadly and vigilant Rosa, understood, with little to no explanation. She didn’t ask questions, she didn’t force Amy to talk, she was just _there_. She stayed by Amy’s side through the long nights, kept her organized when it seemed just short of impossible, and reminded her that there was still hope—there’s _always_ hope, no matter how deeply its buried by the awful darkness of the world.

But Rosa’s gone, too, and Amy feels selfish for grieving her imprisonment to the extent that she is, because she knows it’s hitting Gina hard, too—harder, naturally, because there’s always been something strangely intimate and close about Rosa and Gina, something that’s kept Amy and Jake awake at night exchanging dumb gossip under the covers of their bed, whispering as if they were at a middle school sleepover.

Her handwriting has started to falter on the few non-Hawkins related files she’s completed in the last couple of days. She’s been just exactly on time to work twice already, rather than early, because indecision wears her down every morning in nearly every step of her daily routine, usually leaving her staring at two different options for what to wear that day and her mind screaming something in protest about each one.

(Essentially, she’s been having an anxiety attack for the last three days, and she can’t decide whether to be concerned or upset or frustrated or unsympathetic or _what_.)

In the end, though, no matter how she looks when shows up to work, Gina makes sure to greet her with a thinly veiled roast for whatever she’s wearing.

Gina’s the only one trying to treat her normally in the face of so much awfulness. Captain Holt looks one command away from just sending her home on some mandatory vacation time at nearly every time of day. Terry offered her one of his favorite yogurts—the kind he never shares.

Charles can barely look her in the eye.

By week two, she nearly has the entire file on Hawkins memorized word for word. Even when she’s working on another case, she leaves the Hawkins file open on her desk, just off to the side, still in her peripheral vision, so she can glance over it in between the normal cases. At home, it stays spread out over the coffee table as it had been the day of Jake and Rosa’s sentencing, as if Amy can’t let it out of her sight.

(She sees the words when she closes her eyes every night, usually after two or three in the morning, because she can only sleep when her body’s exhaustion forces her to.)

(She lets this slip to Terry on accident one day, and he looks at her with that expression of concern he always had ready to offer Jake when he’d do something reckless.

“You can take a nap on the break room couch, if you want,” he says, but then cringes at his own words. “Never mind, those are definitely contaminated. But I bet Holt would let you sleep on his couch.”

And Captain Holt has done exactly that before, just weeks ago, when she and Jake had been too invested in the Hawkins case to go home and sleep, so Captain Holt forced them onto the tiny couch in his office and threw a blanket over them, ordering them to sleep.

It’d been cramped, but comfortable. She felt safe—much safer than she does now.

But the idea of sleeping there alone manifests itself in her mind as the image of standing over a vast canyon, completely alone, calling out to someone, but only getting a deep silence penetrated by your own echoes in reply.

So, she says, “No, thank you, I drank too much coffee this morning to sleep.”)

* * *

Week three is when she finally hits the wall.

She’d been able to visit Jake over the weekend—but not on her own. Charles demanded to come, too, and she couldn’t deny him that right, but, _God_ , she wished she and Jake had more time.

Just a minute, or less, where she could wrap her arms around him and rest her head against his chest while the rest of the world around them evaporates into thin air. She’d shower him in “I love you”s and tiny kisses, the kind that make you blush as a child and giggle over as an adult.

But it’s not possible, and Jake looks so completely out of his element, that Amy barely even _says_ anything during the visit, because she’s certain that if she opens her mouth, the only thing that will come out are loud, wet sobs and apologies because the last separation they’d gone through was supposed to be _the_ last separation ever, but Jake had to be taken away again against the wills of everyone who mattered in their personal life.

Jake talks rapidly and passionately, like a child who’s been cooped up for far too long— _Is that not what solitary confinement is?_ Amy’s cruel mind asks itself, because Jake’s sugar-coating everything, because that’s just who he is: a protector—and the visit passes slowly yet quickly, ending far too soon for anyone in their small group of three.

Before Jake can even touch her fingertips one last time, he’s being whisked away by the guard, and Amy’s back in that stupid courtroom with the stupid judge and their stupid, backstabbing witness and stupid Hawkins and Amy can’t do anything because she’s just so _stupid_ and—

Charles gently wraps his fingers around her upper arm, guiding her out of the room when her face betrays her feelings. He’s not Jake, but he’s family to Amy, too, so she settles for crying into his shoulder once they’ve reached the parking lot, her sobs cutting into the mournful silence that had settled between them for the past five minutes.

“We’ll get him out, Amy,” he murmurs, tears of his own lacing his words. “And Rosa, too. We’ll get them out. We’re gonna get Hawkins.”

(And when some dumb Taylor Swift song comes on the radio in the car, Charles raises his hand to change it, but Amy shakes her head, despite the tears gathering in her eyes once again. He moves his hand to return it to its place on the steering wheel, but after a moment, moves it to the gear shift between them, where she laces her fingers in his, squeezing them with each deep breath she takes against the tears threatening to fall.)

* * *

By week four, her hope is laughably absent, and she, simply, doesn’t care.

So, is it really surprising when her monthly therapy session ends with a referral to a psychiatrist that leads her to being prescribed to go back on her meds? 

Medications that entered her life in childhood, medications that she hasn’t needed since she was in _college._ And yet, just four weeks into this Jake-Rosa-Hawkins-prison mess, she’s regressed to a point in her life she hasn’t been at in over ten years.

When she’s finally back in the apartment, standing in the bathroom with the familiar bottles in her hands, she wants to _laugh_.

(Actually, she cries.)

There are rules, of course, about her job and her mental health and how they work together.

She wonders how she’s supposed to tell Captain Holt.

( _That’s what the doctor’s note is for_ , her rationality tries to remind her.)

She wonders how she’s supposed to tell the others.

( _They love you, dummy, they won’t judge you_ , it speaks again.)

She wonders how she’s supposed to tell Jake.

( _Well_ , a more cynical voice in her mind hijacks the conversation, _he’s not here, is he? So, what does he have to do with it?_ )

She takes the damn pills through her tears.

* * *

Amy starts living her life behind a thin curtain of secrets, its tacky pattern constructed of “No, really, I’m fine”s and “I’m just tired from working the case”s and “I know we’ll get them out of prison!”s. She pulls it taught between herself and the squad every morning she walks into the precinct, only opening it and stepping out onto the cold tile of the bathroom when she’s back home at night. 

Despite the medical intervention—which she knows will take its sweet, sweet time to set in—everything just feels a little _worse_ every day that she wakes up to cold sheets.

She rations out his shirts and sweatshirts on a weekly basis, wearing only one per week when she misses him _really_ badly at night, to preserve his presence through scent for as long as she can. She uses his shampoo, despite it making her hair rough and tangled and gross. She presses her face into the blanket he’d last used on their couch over a month ago—it’s been over a _month!_ —pulling away when she feels tears press against the back of her eyes.

One morning, everything just stops.

The thought of moving from the bed, where she’d left a sweatshirt _and_ a shirt on Jake’s side the night prior to spoil herself, makes her feel sick to her stomach. She can’t stop shaking, and her breaths come in and out quickly, and the weight of everything just bears on her mind so _mercilessly_ , she wills herself to hide under the covers with the two articles of Jake’s clothing she’d spoiled herself with.

( _God_ , what was she thinking, wasting _two_ pieces of his clothes? And now she’s dragged them under the covers with her, where her scent will dominate his _instantly_ , and erase even more traces of him and his existence within this apartment, what was she _thinking?_ )

Tears come, or they don’t, Amy doesn’t really know, because one moment she’s here, the next she’s gone, but Jake’s absence remains abundantly clear throughout. Her fingers ghost over old scars on her thighs and she wishes he could just _touch_ her again.

Time passes, she guesses, because eventually she hears knocking from the front door, and her heart reacts by skipping a beat or two, so her only outward reaction is a whimper muffled by the sleeve of Jake’s sweatshirt.

Whoever it is, though, doesn’t knock again, and she hears the door actually _open_. Her heart lurches again, this time in _surprise_ , because could he—could he _really_ have been released without her knowing? Had the squad made a breakthrough? Did Hawkins confess?

“Santiago?”

...The voice isn’t Jake’s.

“Amy, are you here?” 

It’s—it’s _Captain Holt?_

Suddenly, everything is hot, and her entire face just _burns_ with shame. She forces herself to throw the covers off and pushes herself up to a sitting position, despite the tingling in her arms, and she feels her body prepare its go-to natural reaction as of late: tears.

She holds them back, trying to formulate a reply, because Captain Holt wouldn’t just show up unannounced for no reason, so something’s clearly wrong. When she opens her mouth and starts to speak, everything closes up and all that comes out is a sob.

It was enough for Captain Holt to hear, because he knocks on her bedroom door next, waits a few moments, then slowly opens the door. He pokes his head in almost cautiously, as if entering a dragon’s cave, and her face feels impossibly hot when they make eye contact.

“May I…” he pauses. “…come in?”

She manages to shrug.

He hesitates, then accepts the invitation, stepping inside. He closes the door softly behind him, despite no one else being home to impede on their privacy.

“Is everything alright?” he asks, approaching the bed slowly.

Her lower half, clad in short shorts riding up her thighs, is still, thankfully, covered by the covers. She’s fiddling with the hem of Jake’s sweatshirt sleeve in her lap, which grounds her enough to respond with another shrug.

“Well,” he continues awkwardly, “it’s almost noon, and we were all worried when you didn’t come into the precinct this morning nor contact any of us to tell us you would be out.”

“Sorry,” she tries to say, but it comes out as a whisper through trembling lips. She takes a deep breath, squeezing the fabric in her hands. “I’m—sorry.”

“I’m not here to scold you, Detective Santiago,” he says, standing over the bed. “The squad is worried about you—as am I. You’re allowed to take time off in a time like this. It’s expected, even.”

“The case,” she murmurs half-heartedly in protest. “We have to get Hawkins.”

“And we will,” he says gently, “but only with proper rest and self-care.”

Whatever fight was left in her dies, so she just nods, looking back down at her hands.

“Allow me to get you a glass of water,” Captain Holt says when she doesn’t speak.

* * *

Half an hour later, Amy’s showered and dressed in proper clothing, seated across from Captain Holt at the dining table with two fresh mugs of coffee between them. 

“I’m sorry about this morning,” she says. “I was going to come in today—I was. My brain just…didn’t agree.”

He nods slowly. “I know about your medical history, Santiago.”

She mirrors his nod, pressing her lips together awkwardly in a halfhearted attempt at a smile. “Great.”

When he just raises an eyebrow, she scrambles to amend her response. “I mean—yes, that’s—that’s _great!_ You should always know the medical history of your detectives, when you’re the captain, yes…Wait, that’s _confidential_ , how do you—“

“Peralta told me,” he says, “different pieces on several occasions. Mostly when he’s drunk.”

“Ah.” She focuses her attention down on her coffee, resting her fingertips against the hot mug in an attempt to warm them up.

“Yes, it should be confidential,” he says, “and I don’t let it affect my decisions made in the workplace when it comes to assigning you cases. But I believe Jake was coming from a place of love.”

“He always is,” she mumbles, looking back up at Captain Holt. “Though that was still uncool.”

“You’re one of the best detectives in the NYPD, Amy,” Captain Holt says. “You’ve accomplished that because of raw talent and a lot of hard work, regardless of your previous circumstances. You should be proud of that, because I am.”

“Thank you, Captain,” she says, smiling shyly. “That means a lot coming from you.”

“Of course.” He nods. “But that’s why I need you to let me in, Santiago. I need you to tell me what’s going on right now, because it’s affecting your ability to work. I don’t need all the details, but I trust that we’ve grown closer than the boundaries set by a professional relationship.”

“We have,” she says quickly. “We have. The squad…we’re more than just a team, we’re a family.”

Captain Holt nods again.

She takes a deep breath. “I…I don’t know how to explain it all to you, but I guess Jake breaking my doctor-patient-boyfriend confidentiality helped cover all the basics…” She shakes her head, trying to get herself back on track. “Things have gotten worse lately, because Jake’s gone, and he’s helped me get better in a lot of ways. When you and Jake were in Florida, Rosa was the one who helped me out when things got bad, but now, she’s gone, too…and, I mean, you have Kevin, Charles and Terry have their families, Gina has her hands full with the baby coming soon, I-I just…”

When she trails off, Captain Holt tries to help out. “You feel alone, because the rest of us have other people to depend on, which means you have none of us to depend on?”

She winces. “When you say it like that, it sounds stupid, which I guess it is—“

“Those are your feelings, Santiago, and they’re valid,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Logically, I _know_ I’m not alone,” she says, frustration lining her words, “but my brain just forgets that all the time, and I end up…stuck, I guess, like what happened this morning, where I just couldn’t get out of bed—it’s something I’ve had to live with for a long time, but everything’s just been so good for so long lately, even during the times where I felt like the world could end.”

Captain Holt gestures to a paper—a letter—on the other side of the table. It looks as if it’d just recently been unfolded, and Amy fights against the flare of panic within her chest.

“You’ve regressed,” he says simply, pulling the paper between them. She stares at it dumbly, yearning for some sort of liberation from this cruel way of life. “And you were supposed to tell me, because of our line of work.”

She nods minutely, anxiety bubbling up in her chest again. She wonders if he’ll confiscate her badge and gun right here on the spot, or fire her for violating policies that are so crucial to their job.

(She just hopes he’ll allow her to keep working the Hawkins case with the squad, badge or no badge.)

“You’re not medically cleared to carry your gun,” he says, pulling out his glasses and reading over the paper once again.

Amy doesn’t say anything, wringing her hands under the table to cope with the nerves eating at her insides. This is it—this is how she goes out. She’d once thought it would be this way, long ago, before she’d worked past everything and became healthy.

(But, now, she’s back to square one, back to those high school days she would lock herself in her bedroom and pace the small space, trying to cope with the intrusive thoughts.)

“It’s only been a week,” she mumbles weakly. “And I—I stopped bringing it home, after the first two days. I leave it in my locker if I know I’ll be on desk duty all day. I only carry it when I’m going out in the field.”

“Rules are rules, Santiago,” he says, taking his glasses off. “And this is a big rule.”

“I won’t do anything stupid with it, I promise,” she says. “That’s why I keep it locked up. I just—I wanted to continue working, for the distraction from Jake and Rosa, and so I could keep working with the squad to get them out.”

(She screwed up _big time_.)

“I’m sorry,” she offers, though it feels useless in her mouth, and she wants nothing more than to bury herself back in bed, curled up with Jake’s clothes in a poor attempt at filling the void of his absence. “I know I broke so many rules, but I just—I _need_ this, Captain. Please.”

He studies her for a moment, with his carefully guarded expression.

“Desk duty,” he finally says, “until further notice.”

She blinks.

“Your gun stays in _my_ locker,” he continues. “You stay on top of your medication. And when you have incidents like this morning, you make sure to contact someone from the squad or myself to let us know. We want to help you as much as we can, Amy, but we can’t do that if you do reckless things that could get you fired from the job.”

She nods emphatically. “Ye—yes, sir, yes, of course.”

“Take the rest of the day off.” He folds the paper back up, sliding it into his pocket. “Call someone if you need anything.”

She nods again.

“If things get better in the next few weeks, I might be able to get you revaluated to work in the field and carry your gun,” he says. “But you need to take proper care of yourself first.”

He stands from the table and she watches him, a lump forming in her throat. He walks around the table to her side and she ducks her head, submitting to the humiliation and guilt weighing on her shoulders.

Holt hugs her.

It’s sudden and a little awkward, but his arms are around her frame and it’s all she needs to break down again, leaning into his grasp.

(Strangely, things only get better from there.)

* * *

Amy returns to work the following week, having taken Friday off in addition to her tumultuous Thursday with Holt. 

Gina had randomly (or, maybe, not so randomly) decided to start her maternity leave a day early, so Amy went over to her apartment and they hung out like old friends, with minimal, amicable roasting throughout the afternoon. Charles came over for dinner, bringing his home cooking—a normal meal, thankfully—and Gina’s apartment was filled with the laughter Amy wasn’t sure she’d experience again soon. Like children, they penned letters with nonsensical doodles littered across the margins to send to both Rosa and Jake, because sometimes happiness doesn’t have to come in the form of something huge.

(And, for the first time in a while, Amy felt genuinely happy.)

It was short-lived, of course, as these things go. She spent the weekend with an unopened pack of cigarettes tucked into her pocket, because she’d promised Jake she’d quit and she _had_ been making some progress, but this was her last emergency pack that she’d nearly cracked open some ten odd times between Saturday and Sunday, but she pushed through.

(She spoiled herself late Saturday night with an e-cig, half-leaning out their bathroom window, but she figured it could’ve been worse and she could’ve spent the past month smoking, but she hasn’t.)

Monday, when she walks into the precinct, she’s greeted with warm smiles from the squad. Though the emptiness at Jake and Rosa’s desks amplifies the continuous, dull ache in her chest that started in the courtroom and hasn’t stopped since, Amy keeps walking until she reaches her desk and pushes the sadness from the forefront of her mind. The space in her purse that had once been for cigarettes now has her anxiety meds, in case something happens and she needs them, and she thinks, maybe, she can do this. After getting her things settled, she enters Holt’s office to check in with him, and together, they go to the women’s locker room.

There, Amy opens her locker and slowly pulls the gun out in its holster. A mixture of thoughts stream through her mind—such as the trust Holt still has for her, allowing her to bring her gun to him herself. She knows she wouldn’t do something stupid or reckless to someone else with it; she at least knows herself that much. However, the gesture, even if unintentional (but is probably intentional, because this is _Holt_ ), speaks volumes to Amy and gives her an unexpected confidence boost.

She transfers the firearm to him outside and he nods with a smile. “Thank you, Detective Santiago. I’m very proud to be your mentor.”

“I’m very proud to be your…student,” she replies with a nervous laugh, but the moment retains its genuine feel.

* * *

A couple weeks later, she visits Jake with Charles again, and it goes as smoothly as it can, she thinks. This time, there are no tears or breakdowns or anything of the sort; she squeezes Charles’ hand before they enter the prison, and again on the way back out. They listen to the Taylor Swift playlist Jake had made for the squad on the drive back, singing the lyrics they know as loudly as they can. 

The squad continues working as hard as they can to solve the Hawkins case, on top of their everyday cases, as well as covering Jake and Rosa’s loads of cases.

Somehow, some way, Jake gets his hands on a cellphone, and Amy talks to him whenever she can, wherever she can, about anything and everything. They talk about office gossip, prison gossip, family gossip, how Rosa’s doing, how Jake’s new goddaughter, Enigma, is doing, _Die Hard_ —no topic is off-limits.

Except for one: Amy and her current health predicament.

She keeps how she’s doing as vague and optimistic as possible, and Jake doesn’t seem to completely buy it, but what time they do get together is precious, so he doesn’t waste it with endless prying questions. She tells herself that telling him in person, after he’s released, is the happiest ending possible in this scenario, which is why she can’t tell him now, over the phone; it’ll spoil the happy ending she’s dreamed up for herself, for _them_ , in addition to causing useless stress in Jake’s already complicated life.

(She doesn’t want to know what he had to do to keep the phone, she really doesn’t after that conversation she overheard between him and another inmate, but at the same time, she needs to know. She figures it’s the secret he’ll share during their happy ending reunion, because as long as he’s free and back home with her, that ending is nothing but happy, no matter what confessions they have for each other when all is said and done.)

* * *

Finally, she passes her med eval after months of self-care and turning to her friends when she needs them most, and she’s cleared for field work again. Holt returns her gun and its back in its rightful place on her left hip and she hugs him because she can’t help herself. Gina even dedicates an alcohol-free toast to Amy at her baby shower and Amy knows baby Enigma will be in good hands. 

She starts going to the library regularly again, both to read and to organize, because it allows her to expend the pent-up nervous energy that’d otherwise manifest itself in red, angry thoughts that keep her up at night. She doesn’t mean to be the rude to the librarians, she’s doing them a public service, _really_ , but she needs this, so she doesn’t do something stupid like lie about her health to keep her job as a distraction.

Encountering Seamus Murphy refills her tank of anxiety, though, and he leaves her with a choice.

A month ago, she would’ve said yes on the spot.

Tonight, though, she rips the defiled page from the book with shaky fingers and a hitch in her breath, a pros and cons list already writing itself in her mind.

(She leaves the informative page with Holt at the precinct the next day, because she knows better than to tempt herself at a time like this; he locks it in his drawer with a proud nod, like he’d given her a month ago, and, for once, something other than anxiety flutters up in her chest.)

When she talks to Jake on the phone that day, she decides not to tell him.

* * *

Their operation to bust Hawkins falls apart at the seams all in one moment, with their guns all pointed in the direction they’d hoped would lead Jake and Rosa back into their arms, but everything fails, and Amy’s hands shake with the need for that page from that book that she’d _ripped_ that could fix everything, future consequences be damned. 

She tries to control the external evidence of her deep disappointment on the way back to the precinct, because this moment is not unlike that final one in the courtroom—all eyes on her, filled with pity and reflecting a grief like the kind weighing heavily in her heart.

When they return to the precinct, with the pain from the loss of Jake and Rosa made new in her mind, she sits—not at her desk, but at Jake’s, for the first time since he’d been sent to prison.

No one says anything. Charles has that silly beard on still, which emits a certain chaotic energy familiar to how things used to be within the squad, despite their currently missing members, and it strangely grounds Amy. 

She rests her hands on the arm rests and leans her head back, letting the cold chair consume her, if even for just a moment. She looks at the pictures and trinkets on Jake’s desk, then turns toward the wall, where she sees that awful, victorious photo of them from years ago framed. It’s dusty now.

Looking back at his desk, her eyes fall on a different framed picture of the two of them, a stolen moment at Shaw’s sometime last year or the year before captured (probably) by Charles, and she recognizes it as the picture she’d brought to work to place on _her_ desk, only to have it stolen by Jake the first moment she left her desk unattended.

“We’ll get you out,” she mumbles to herself. “I promise.”

She stands up and moves to sit beside Charles’ desk and regroup with the others, just as Holt emerges from his office saying something about pigs.

* * *

The rest of the day passes in a blur—a whirlwind of crazy theories and information about pig digestion that Amy would’ve been fine _not_ having to know and Holt describing some chess move to Hawkins while putting her in handcuffs.

That’s the crispest moment of it all for Amy, seeing the downfall of Hawkins. Holt even lets Amy take her, while he moves to help arrest the others, and everything slows down when she takes that first step toward Hawkins. 

This moment lasts forever, Amy thinks; it’s one of the most crucial in her life, and Jake’s, and their relationship. This woman had been the universe’s latest impenetrable wall built between Jake and Amy, and now, she was very much penetrable.

(“Title of your sex tape,” Amy mumbles to herself, somewhere between a laugh and a cry, a hesitant smile teasing her lips.)

She grabs Hawkins roughly and doesn’t say anything. What is there to say in the short moments it takes to push Hawkins outside and into the squad car? Amy’s brain formulates an entire galaxy’s worth of emotions and thoughts that she’s not sure she could translate into words for another human being to comprehend.

Finally, just before opening the door of the squad car to push Hawkins in, Amy stops.

“I knew you wouldn’t win,” she says lowly, just inches away from Hawkins’ ear.

Hawkins doesn’t respond, just challenges her with a look, but Amy guides her down into the car, slamming the door closed after her. Amy watches her through the glass, for a few moments, relishing in the fresh high of victory and hopes come true, until Charles lays a hand on her arm and breaks her from her reverie.

“Jake’s gonna come home now,” he says softly, with a smile brighter than any Amy has seen in ages. “Rosa, too.”

“Yeah,” is all Amy replies with, because a different kind of anxiety fills her chest, and she pulls Charles into a hug.

* * *

Amy emerges from the nightmare with a hop in her step and a bag of fresh clothes for Jake and herself with her meds stuffed somewhere down in the bottom below everything, because sometimes a homecoming takes more than one day and sometimes she doesn’t need to organize everything. 

Jake emerges from the nightmare with a hefty beard and an orange jumpsuit that never ceases to make Amy’s heart lurch, but the words “babe” and “Ames” and “I love you” and “I missed you” are all somehow formed on his lips at the same time when they reunite, face-to-face, and this is their happy ending.

The happy ending where they’ll have secrets to confess, damage to undo, wounds to medicate. Amy thinks it’s okay, though; the moment his arms are around her and her face is pushed into his chest, her longtime anxiety and OCD and everything else of the like aren’t instantaneously cured—they probably never will be—but she’s reminded that she’s never alone.

This is their happy ending.

* * *

(“It was bad while you were gone,” she whispers to him sometime later, in the familiar safety of their bed, her meds left out on the nightstand because he’d found them earlier and the secret was out. “I was bad.” 

“It’s okay,” he whispers back, “I accidentally had meth while I was in prison.”

She looks at him with a million questions swirling in her brain, but he shakes his head and continues running his hand up and down her arm.

“We can unpack that another night,” he murmurs, and she smiles at the humor she’d missed. “I wanna talk about you tonight. You haven’t been on meds since college, right?”

It’s a question, but she knows that he knows the answer, because Jake might have the memory of a goldfish when it comes to the general comings and goings of life, but he’s always committed her secrets and confessions to heart.

[And apparently shared some of them with Holt, but she decides to put off _that_ conversation for another night.]

“Yeah,” she says. “And I don’t know when I’ll be off them again.”

“That’s okay,” he says.

“It doesn’t have to be,” she says even more quietly. “It can be a lot to handle. You can leave. I’d understand.”

It’s been a deal breaker before.

But Jake is Jake, so Jake says, “No way, Ames. You’re stuck with me.”

His hands find hers under the covers and he squeezes them in that gentle, yet firm, way he always does, and she looks up at him through her eyelashes.

“Forever?” she asks, and her heart skips a beat.

“Forever,” he says. “And a _day_.”

“Not possible.”

“Live a little, babe.”

She pushes her face into his chest to stifle her laughter and he wraps his arms around her and she thinks maybe, just maybe, she can love herself as much as Jake loves her one day. For now, though, she’s more than content.

“Just don’t let me do meth ever again,” he adds a moment later. “It was awful.”)

**Author's Note:**

> idk how real life cop rules work but does it really matter if this is a fictional cop show and mayhaps amy's experience isn't grounded in the realest of the real reality but ya girl had to project all this anxiety onto somethin also time isn't real so rip the canon timeline here
> 
> ANYWAY this is my foray into the b99 fandom (peraltiago!!!!!) so hello! i'm usually not this emo but Life Comes At You Fast. i love b99 but i also love angst so i'm usually left needing some angst to supplement all the fun stuff in the show. comedy comes from a place of sadness so i love exploring that sadness. thank u for coming to my ted talk and i hope u have a wonderful day/week/life
> 
> (also catch me on the [tumblez](http://pikapegasus.tumblr.com/)!)


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